News From the Blog

Spikecrawler

Endemic to the Badlands, the spikecrawler is a voracious predatory species that hunts the larvae of giant insects in natural caverns and tunnels beneath the earth there and are rarely seen on the surface except on nights of the blood moon, whereupon they burst out from beneath the ground and hunt anything that moves until the dawn.

They are most commonly encountered in the various mines throughout the Badlands – and will confront and attack anything that stumbles upon them as they engage in the hunt, often raking two sets of huge downward pointing tusks with incredible strength and ferocity and using their spiked legs to pierce anything that dares to approach them from the rear or the sides. While their teeth and spikes are razor sharp, they are also dripping in poison that causes almost instant paralysis – and while nearly blind, they will use their sense of smell, which is highly developed, to seek out and eat their paralyzed prey, literally tearing them into easy to swallow chunks.

With no known redeeming qualities, these creatures are solitary hunters and do not breed but every few years split into two half sized spikecrawlers before scuttling away, and thus if unchecked, their numbers grow exponentially. However, if they become too numerous they become prone to a hideous disease which turns their skin rainbow colored and destroys what little is left of their minds and become nothing more than demented killing machines that do not even bother to eat their kills, and if they cannot find enough to satisfy them underground, have been known to burst through to the surface and are a constant danger to travelers or inhabitants of the Badlands who live near subterranean areas and the mines.